IN LOVE AND WAR
“Secret de deux, secret de Dieu.”
“Guess anybody could be a soldier and swing a sword, while it takes brains to make a doctor.”
Now I was a doctor, and a very young one in those days, new to the regiment and conscious of my inferiority to its merest subaltern. The young person who made the above observation was, moreover, pretty, with dark eyes and the most bewitching lips that ever gave voice to an American accent. My heart was young, and therefore easily stirred by such vanities—nothing stirs it now but the cry of the bugle and the sullen roar that rises from the ranks when, at last, T. Atkins is allowed to get to the bayonet.
We were sitting in the verandah of the Residency in the capital of a northern tributary state which need not be further specified here. The Rajah was in difficulties and unable, without our aid, to dispose of a claimant to his throne, whose hereditary right originated somewhere in the lifetime of St. Paul. General Elias J. Watson, of Boston, U.S.A., was travelling for the enlargement of his own and his daughter's mind.
“Pa is just going to write a book about things in general,” explained Miss Bertha Watson, with a wise little smile, when her father's thirst for information became irksome.
Hearing in Simla that an expeditionary force was about to be despatched to the assistance of the Rajah of Oadpur, General Watson hastened thither. He had letters of introduction from sundry persons who wished to get rid of him to sundry others who had no desire to assist in any way. But the old man's naivete and characteristically simple interest in details soon made their way, while Bertha's wise little smile carried all before it. It somehow conveyed the impression that she knew a thing or two of which we were ignorant, and like one man we fell to desiring knowledge of those things. I was nowhere. Doctors never are anywhere in regimental competitions, for they are usually, like myself, deadly poor. Sometimes Bertha danced with me, as on this occasion, at the impromptu entertainments given by the Resident.
“Say, shall we have another?” she observed before my heart had recovered from the effect of the last remark. And she handed me the stationery department envelope which served as a programme on these occasions.
I fumbled for my pencil in a seventh heaven of joy. I had read somewhere that women sometimes give their hearts to small and insignificant men. But it seemed unlikely that this referred to such women as Bertha Watson. I had never dreamt of cutting out the other men: Major Le Mesurier-Groselin, who had money, for instance, or Austin Graham—especially Austin Graham. There had been a rumour in the air—planted there, no doubt, by some of the women who have a marvellous scent for a light trail—that there was an understanding between Graham and Bertha. I noticed that she never looked at him with her bewitching little smile as she did at the rest of us. But that was all I could detect. Perhaps she thought that he was wiser than herself. Perhaps, moreover, she was right; for Graham was the wisest man up there, and I think the bravest. He meant business, he told me, and had come to make his name in this little war.